The IIASA-ISC Resilient Food Systems report looks at the vulnerabilities in the food system and recommends changes to move forward through COVID-19 recovery plans that prioritize society’s least protected.
Federation of Austrian Industries, Vienna, Austria
The 6th Viennese Talks on Resilience and Networks is co-organized by IIASA and FASresearch. In an effort to support a convergence of ideas between systems ecology, complexity, ecomimcry, sustainability, networks, resilience and "building back better", authors of the recently published book “A New Ecology: Systems Perspective” are meeting in this workshop to provide insight into ecological principles.
IIASA researchers have used Sentinel 1 satellite imagery from the European Space Agency to produce a map of the extent and year of detection of oil palm plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand that will help policymakers and other stakeholders understand trends in oil palm expansion to inform landscape-level planning.
By applying multidimensional demographic models that incorporate differential fertility, mortality, migration, and educational attainment, IIASA's Population and Just Societies Program has developed the Demographic Data Sheets (DDS), which provide population projections by age, sex, and education for Europe, Asia, and the world. The DDS also present indicators on human capital and innovative measures of aging developed at IIASA, offering insights into demographic change across world regions and individual countries. These data products build on IIASA’s long-standing expertise in population forecasting and multidimensional demographic modeling.
The IIASA-ISC Consultative Science platform has engaged transdisciplinary global thought leaders to produce four reports that focus on a more sustainable pathway to a post COVID-19 world. This blog post looks at the report on Strengthening Science Systems.
In the framework of the Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration, a research partnership between IIASA's World Population Program and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, IIASA provides science-based knowledge on migration and demography to support EU policy.
IIASA researchers have developed multi-dimensional/multi-state models to study population dynamics at the global, regional, national and sub-national level.
The linkage algorithms solve the problem of linking models, e.g. sectorial and/or regional, into an inter-sectorial inter-regional integrated model. Linkage enables to avoid “hard linking” of models in a single code, which saves the programming time and enables parallel distributed computations of individual models instead of a large scale integrated model. Models linkage preserves the structure of the original models taking into account critically important details, which are usually missing in aggregate models.
Stochastic Quasi-Gradient (SQG) methods have been developed for solving general optimization problems without exact calculation of objective function and constraints (let alone of their derivatives). SQG methods enable a sequential revision of approximate solutions towards the optimal using newly acquired information on the system, obtained via either direct on-line observations or(and) simulations.
Elena Rovenskaya speaks at the high-level Government After Shock Global Forum to help inform a global dialogue on systemic change needed beyond COVID-19 crisis.
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and IIASA are presenting the Fourth OECD-IIASA Systems Thinking, Anticipation, and Resilience Task Force meeting on Systemic Recovery.
Can cooperation across sectors and countries help to achieve sustainable development? How do stakeholders in the Indus and Zambezi basins envision the future and how can they make that future a reality? IIASA researchers looked into these questions as part of a large-scale initiative with international partners.
World Water Day held annually on 22 March, celebrates water and raises awareness of the 2.2 billion people living without access to safe water. It is about taking action to tackle the global water crisis. A core focus of World Water Day is to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: Water and sanitation for all by 2030.
Three different scenarios for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, focusing on the goals that could impact fertility and mortality rates and thus population growth are now available for downloading.
IIASA researchers worked with local stakeholders from the East African Community to explore and co-develop regional water scenarios that can enhance understanding of the up- and downstream water sector interactions in the extended Lake Victoria Basin to facilitate rational water resource planning.
Solar energy is a clean, renewable source of electricity that could potentially play a significant part in fulfilling the world’s energy requirements, but there are still some challenges to fully capitalizing on this potential. Researchers looked into some of the issues that hamper the uptake of solar energy and proposed different policies to encourage the use of this technology.
Nadejda Komendantova from the Cooperation and Transformative Governance group is invited to provide an opening keynote presentation at the VIII International Workshop on Critical Infrastructures in the Digital World. The aim of the workshop is to discuss theoretical and methodological issues of development and integration of intelligent, agent-based and cloud computing for contingency management in critical infrastructures as well as to talk about Situational Awareness, Semiotics, Visual Analytics, Semantic Modeling and Cognitive Graphics and their applications in critical infrastructures.